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The Scholar Who Predicted America's Breakdown Says It's Just Beginning
(www.newsweek.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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"Turchin wrote in the journal Nature in 2010, forecasting a spike in unrest around 2020, driven by economic inequality, 'elite overproduction' and rising public debt,"
Turchin has a Capital reading group?
What does elite overproduction mean? Surplus of educated people?
In the modern era that's basically it (because higher education represents the biggest generation of elites), but it's more general.
Elite in this case is simply the highest caste, class or social strata that enforces some form of power over the lower ones.
Let's say there's X amount of elite "positions" (cuz being a King is not a job and this applies to history as well) every year, presidents, senators, bankers, CEO's, all the way to some upper middle class jobs.
Every year this set of jobs can expand or contract. These positions require (through culture or ability) social elites to fulfill their function, people of privilege, college educated, connected, skilled, etc. Let's call the amount of elites Y
Elite overproduction essentially is a phenomenon in a country where Y > X and grows Y at a greater rate than X year over year.
In Tsarist Russia for example Y (represented by the nobility) grew at a rate of 2.5 over ~75 years. In that same time X had only grown through fake make work councils which could not subsume all of the elites being produced.
However that's not all the Y there was, Russia was also growing like the world was and petty bourgoisie were also growing adding to Y.
Historically the conflict between the nobility and the bourgeoisie has been a conflict of the nobility refusing to make de jure space for the bourgeoisie and being de facto evicted from that space. That's literally the French Revolution.
This isn't just Marxism rebranded because this applies to socialist countries in history such as the USSR, and currently such as China.